In recent years, the Wi-Fi Alliance, which is a wireless LAN world organization, has established a Wi-Fi Direct standard (Wi-Fi Alliance homepage, Internet <http://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-direct >). In Wi-Fi Direct, a function (service discovery function) is defined as an option function in which before executing wireless LAN connection processing, service information for services that are supported by higher ranking applications is advertised/searched. According to this service discovery function, before performing connection processing, a service of a terminal in the vicinity is searched using a wireless LAN Probe Request, and it is possible to advertise a service of the self-terminal using a Probe Response packet. By using the service discovery function, when a service to search for is instructed by a user operation, the terminal starts a search for the service, and displays a list of terminals that provide the service. Additionally, when a partner terminal with which communication is performed is selected by a user operation, wireless LAN connection processing by Wi-Fi Direct with said partner terminal is executed and the service can be executed.
Also, in recent years, mounting of NFC (Near Field Communication) technology in terminal devices as described above is starting to spread. By a user simply performing an operation of having terminals approach each other, a one-to-one communication path is established by NFC, and transmitting/receiving of data can be performed between the terminals. Also, in the NFC Forum which is an NFC world organization, technology for handover from NFC to different wireless communication methods, such wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11 series), Bluetooth (registered trademark) or the like, is standardized (NFC Forum homepage, Internet <http://nfc-forum.org/>). By using the present technique, a user is able to perform wireless LAN connection processing or the like simply by performing an operation to have terminals approach each other.
As described above, the service discovery function of Wi-Fi Direct does not consider an approach of searching/advertising service information that uses NFC; it is necessary to select a terminal that executes a desired service by a user operation, and the operation is cumbersome.